In a number of the broadcasts about 9/11 and related events, a comparison has been advanced between the U.S. at the time of 9/11 and France prior to, and during, World War II. Other, related programs have highlighted the view that elements of the law enforcement and national security institutions of this country were actively subverted by a Fifth Column, loyal to the Underground Reich and its Islamofascist allies.

1. This program analyzes the relationship between the Fifth Column that subverted France and structural Franco-German economic relationships within which the Fifth Column existed and operated. In addition, the program compares the Franco-German steel and coal industries and the relationship between American petroleum interests and the Saudi/Islamofascist forces underlying the events of 9/11.

2. A central point of discussion is the distinction between structural relationships binding together economic forces on opposite sides of political issues and the subversive process itself. Just as a mosquito that transmits malaria communicates the infection by drawing blood, so the Saudi/US petroleum relationship underlies the process of subversion and the attacks of 9/11. As the drawing of blood is essential to, though not for the purpose of, communicating disease, so the drawing of oil is central to, though not the raison d’etre, for terrorism. Although the economic relationships discussed in this program (US/Saudi, Franco/German coal & steel) are central to the process of subversion and the activities of the Fifth Column, those relationships must be understood as distinct from the subversion itself.

In addition, one should not lose sight of the fact that the Islamofascists of Al Qaeda, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the Bush family, and the Franco/German heavy industrial interests all have historical links to the Third Reich, both in its above ground and postwar underground phases.

3. A recent report from a Rand Corporation analyst discussed the stark realities of Saudi hostility to the United States, as manifested in the events of 9/11 and the Saudi sponsorship of Palestinian terrorism. Numerous programs document the profound role of the Saudi elite in the funding of Al Qaeda. In considering how it is that a country can attack the United States (as Saudi Arabia did on 9/11) and escape the consequences, one should bear in mind the Islamofascist milieu that operates within the petro-economic structural relationship between the two countries. “A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorists or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States.” (“Saudi Arabia Castigated in Briefing” by Thomas E. Ricks [Washington Post]; San Jose Mercury News; 8/6/2002; p. 12A.)

4. ” ‘The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader,’ stated the explosive briefing, which was presented July 10 to the Defense Policy Board, a group of prominent intellectuals and former senior officials who, advise the Pentagon on defense policy.” (Idem.)

5. ” ‘Saudi Arabia Supports our enemies and attacks our allies,’ said the briefing prepared by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corporation analyst. A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as ‘the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent’ in the Mideast. . .” (Idem.)

6. “Murawiec said in his briefing that the U.S. should demand that Riyadh stop funding fundamentalist Islamic outlets around the world, stop all anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli statements in the country, and ‘prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including in the Saudi intelligence services.'” (Idem.)

7. “If the Saudis refused to comply, the briefing continued, Saudi oil fields and overseas financial assets should be ‘targeted,’ although exactly how was not specified.” (Idem.)

8. The relationship between the Underground Reich, the GOP, the Bush family, the Saudis, and the oil industry is illustrated by Talat Othman, Abdullah Bakshs, and Harken energy. A protégé of the BCCI milieu, business associate of George Bush, an intimate of (and interlocutor for) the milieu of Youssef Nada and Al Qaeda, as well as a key player in the GOP ethnic outreach organization, Othman embodies the overlap of the oil business and the 9/11 Fifth Column. “In 1987 an obscure Saudi financier named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh invested in Harken, a Texas oil company of which George W. Bush was a director from 1986 to 1993.” (Forbidden Truth; Jean-Charles Brisard & Guillaume Dasquie; Copyright 2002 [SC]; Thunder’s Mouth/Nation Books; ISBN 1-56025-414-9; p. 132.)

9. “The deal consisted of recapitalizing the company, which was going through difficult times. This Saudi investor was none other than the partner of Khalid bin Mahfouz and Ghaith Pharaon. And so Taha Bakshs became an 11.5 percent shareholder in Harken Energy Corp.” (Idem.)

10. “His [Bakshs] representative within Harken Energy is not unknown either. Talat Othman, is a member alongside Frank Carlucci of one of America’s most prestigious think tanks, the Middle East Policy Council as well as being a leading Arab-American supporter of the Republican party.” (Ibid.; p. 133.)

11. Othman, in turn, is a protégé of Abdullah Bakshs, the U.S. business representative of the Bin Laden family between 1976-1982. Salem Bin Laden was represented by another Bush business associate, James R. Bath-himself a representative of the Bin Mahfouz business interests (closely linked to the support network underlying Al Qaeda. “Between 1976 and 1982, Abdullah Taha Bakhshs-an investor in Harken energy, recall-was the representative for the Bin Laden family in the United States. He also represents Khalid bin Mahfouz’s financial interests in the Middle East. What’s more, several sources emphasize the fact that he represents the interests of Khalid Salim bin Mahfouz on the board of directors of Investcorp. In fact, Bin Mahfouz holds a 25 percent stake in Investcorp, thanks to Bakhsh’s services.” (Ibid.; p. 136.)

12. The relationship between the Bush family and the Saudi elite (closely connected to the Bin Laden milieu) can be compared with the relationship between the De Wendels and the Rochlings (as well as other German industrialists). (The Ruhr is a traditional coal-producing region, with strong economic links to the French steel producers of the Lorraine district.) This relationship transcended French national interests, and worked to subvert them at times. The De Wendel family in France had strong connections with, among others, the Rochlings in Germany. This resulted in French protection for German steel producing elements in the Briey Basin during World War I, the protection of the Rochlings from French criminal charges between the wars, and the awarding of key contracts for construction of the Maginot Line to the Rochlings prior to World War II.

. . . . . The horizontal separation of private interests from government policies went even further. The struggle of the interwar period was not simply a clash between French interests on the one side and German interests on the other. During the development of the Ruhr-Lorraine industrial complex, like-minded industrialists in France and Germany had become directors of jointly owned and jointly controlled financial, industrial, and distributing enterprises. In many cases common views on questions of economic organization, labor policy, social legislation, and attitude toward government had been far more important to the industrialists than differences of nationality or citizenship. After 1870 the interdependence of the French and German iron and steel industries led the owners to work together despite national differences, although the private activities of the French owners were, in many instances, in direct opposition to French public policy. It is curious to note that only the French appeared to have this conflict between public policy and private activities. On the German side, complete co-ordination seems to have been preserved between national and private interests; between officials of the German Republic and the leaders of German industry and finance. . . .

13. “During World War I the de Wendels, the influential French-German banking and industrial family which headed the French wing of the International Steel Cartel through their Comite des Forges and whose members had sat in the parliaments of both France and Germany, were able to keep the French army from destroying industrial plants belonging to the German enterprises of the Rochling family. These plants were located in the Briey Basin, a Lorraine ore field then in German control.” (Idem.)

14. “The Rochling family, with their powerful complex of coal, iron, steel and banking enterprises in Germany, has for generations played in close harmony with the de Wendel family. For a century, the descendants of Christian Rochling have dominated the industry and commerce of the Saar Basin. It was Hermann Rochling who arranged the return of the Saar to Germany in the plebiscite of January 1935 by organizing the Deutsche Front, which delivered 90 percent of the votes to the Nazis. Though seventy-two members of the Rochling family have survived two world wars and are still active in the business of the Saar today, two other members of the family, Hermann and his brother Robert, a major, had been put in charge of production in the Briey Basin. After the war, when the brothers Rochling moved out of the areas which had to be ceded to France under the Treaty, the two of them carried away bodily a couple of large steel plants.” (Idem.)

15. “Conceiving this grand larceny to be something in the nature of a war crime, the French government tried the brothers Rochling in absentia and sentenced them to forty years in prison. But the German government never would give up the Rochlings to the French. For the next twenty-two years the brothers were under this cloud as far as the French government was concerned. On the other hand, as far as the French steel makers’ association, the Comite des Forges, and in particular the de Wendels who headed the Comite, were concerned, it was business as usual-or in this case, business as unusual-that prevailed. In the end even the French government weakened for business purposes, though the war-crime sentence remained. When it came time for France to build its impregnable Maginot Line, who should be called in to supply steel and technical assistance but the German firm of the brothers Rochling. If the French behaved in this as did the Americans during World War II in the case of insurance coverage on war plants, they doubtless placed plenty of guards to protect the security and secrecy of the Maginot Line construction from the prying eyes of the general public while the blueprints rested safely in the hands of the only people to whom they mattered: to wit, the enemy.” (Ibid.; p. 35.)

16. “Now comes the outbreak of World War II. The French army marching into the Saar during the ‘phony war’ period in 1939, received orders not to fire on or damage the plants of the ‘war criminals,’ the brothers Rochling. In 1940 came the blitz and the fall of France. The Vichy government passed a decree exonerating the Rochlings and canceling their forty-year prison sentences.” (Ibid.; p. 36.)

17. The Franco-German steel cartel, in turn, was part of an international steel cartel featuring the Thyssen firm Vereinigte Stahlwerke (later Thyssen A.G.). “The mid-twenties were remarkable for German industrial combination. They marked the formation of the United Steel Works in Germany, as a combination of the four biggest steel producers Ernst Poensgen, Fritz Thyssen, Otto Wolff, and the others who drew this combine together had managed to get over a hundred million dollars from private investors in the United States. Dillon Read & Company, the New York investment house which brought Clarence Dillon, James V. Forrestal, William H. Draper, Jr., and others into prominence, floated the United Steel Works bonds in the United States behind a glowing prospectus which declared that the United Steel Works Corporation (Vereinigte Stahlwerke) ‘will be the largest industrial unit in Europe and one of the largest manufacturers of iron and steel in the world, ranking in productive capacity second only to the United States Steel Corporation.’ The formation of United Steel gave its management tremendous power in Germany: enough to carry through without delay the organization of the German domestic steel cartel, and to guarantee the ‘good behavior’ of all German steel companies in their agreements with foreign firms.” (Ibid.; pp. 41-42.)

18. Much of the second side discusses the actions of the Fifth Column in France prior to, and during, World War II. (For more about this Fifth Column, see Miscellaneous Archive Show M61.) It is important to note in this context, that Mr. Emory stresses that the analogy between the Fifth Column in France and its counterpart in the United States is not an exact one. There are significant differences between the situation in France before World War II and that in the U.S. today. Nonetheless there are similarities worth examining. One should note that France was governed by a democratic coalition government under Leon Blum (the Social Front or Popular Front), which included the French communist party. Under the social pressures brought about by the Great Depression and the inability of liberal democratic governments to deal adequately with the social fallout from it, many countries experienced powerful fascist movements. Such was the case in France. Industrialists, financiers, aristocrats and members of the armed forces were among the fascist plotters that saw the elimination of the Blum government as a necessity. After initial failure in the plot by the fascist Cagoulards in 1938, many of the fascists acceded to power in the Vichy government after the German conquest.

19. The account of the actions of the French Fifth Column relies heavily on the account provided by Pierre Cot, the French minister of aviation under the Leon Blum government. In his 1944 book Triumph of Treason, Cot discussed the subversion of the French military resistance to the Germans by members of the armed forces sympathetic to the fascist cause. The Vichy government then undertook to pin the stunning military defeat on the Blum government, instead of the conspiratorial activities of some of its own sympathizers. “First of all, it was necessary to ‘preserve the honor of the Army.’ General Weygand thundered these words like a command. He used, unconsciously, the same terms that leaders of the French Army had invoked during the Dreyfus affair to prevent public opinion from discovering their critical mistakes. ‘Preserve the honor of the Army,’ to French military men, is to secure by every means-including those outlawed by moral law and the Penal Code-the defense of the military corporation.”

20. “The question of the responsibility of military leaders in the military defeat of France either had to be evaded or posed in distorted terms. To ‘preserve the honor of the Army,’ the scapegoats of the defeat had to be chosen from the political personnel of the Third Republic.” (Triumph of Treason; by Pierre Cot; Copyright 1944 [HC]; Ziff-Davis; p. 14.)

21. The combination of ineptitude and deliberate subversion by elements of the armed forces was relatively well known at the time. (One should bear in mind the discussion of the intelligence failures in regard to 9/11. A similar combination of ineptitude and subversion was responsible for those failures.) “In truth, at the end of June, 1940, the question of who was responsible was in everyone’s mind. In the two weeks preceding the armistice, I was in touch with the crowd of refugees that slowly and painfully followed the roads southward. In the offices of the prefects, in the town halls, restaurants, and relief centers, I listened to many conversations received many confidences, heard many opinions. Opinions differed on governmental policy, but all agreed in denouncing the blunders of the French General Staff. The country was unanimous, not against Blum, Daladier, or me, nor even against Laval, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Georges Bonnet, or Jacques Doriot, but against the generals who had been incapable of understanding the conditions of modern warfare and who were guilty of not knowing the rudiments of their profession. ‘Just as before 1914 they had prepared for the war of 1870,’ the people said, ‘before 1939 they prepared for the war of 1914.'” (Ibid.; pp. 14-15.)

22. “The severest condemnation came from the soldiers. Lost on the roads in pursuit of dispersed divisions and phantom regiments, thrown together with the refugees whose uncertainties and anxieties they share, the men in uniform cursed the conduct of their leaders. They repeated that they never had been schooled in the techniques of modern warfare, especially in the combined use of tanks and aviation, and they were amazed at the ineptness of their commanders in the battles of May and June. They asked why the Meuse and Seine bridges had not been blown up before the arrival of German motorized columns; why Paris had not been defended street by street, as the Spanish Republicans had defended Madrid (and as the Russians were to defend Stalingrad); and they wanted to know why more than half of the tanks and airplanes had been left in the rear-in Orleans, Toulouse, Lyon, North Africa-instead of being massed for a counterattack that might have changed everything. They knew that the depots were bursting with the cannon, airplanes, and equipment they had needed.” (Idem.)

23. “One began to hear quoted the disturbing remarks with which General Weygand had tried to persuade the cabinet to ask for an armistice: that he needed his tanks to master the revolutionary elements, if it should become necessary. That is to say, the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army preferred fighting French workers to throwing all his forces against the German troops. The soldiers praised the bravery of certain leaders-Giraud, Lestien, De Gaulle, Lucien, Delattre de Tassigny, and many others-but they declared that most of the officers had been the first to flee. ‘They left in automobiles and we left on foot,’ they said, talking about those officers, faithful followers of l’Action Francaise, Je Suis Partout, Gringoire, and other Fascist newspapers which had said in various forms, during the winter, that this was a democratic war and consequently did not interest them.” (Ibid.; p. 15.)

24. “Their anger was legitimate. It was inexplicable, after all, that the General Staff, after deciding to abandon Paris and thus opening the east to the Germans, had not ordered the troops which occupied the Maginot Line to fall back toward the south. More than a million men, the best of the French Army, were caught in the German trap, a disaster which could have been prevented by an order from General Weygand.” (Ibid.; pp. 15-16.)

25. “By its composition, the government of Vichy was representative not of the French people but of the General Staff. Its first cabinets were headed by Petain, the spiritual leader of the French Army, the man who had played the most important part in the preparation of the war and in the formation of the General Staff. And these cabinets were composed largely of members of the General Staff-General Weygand, General Pujo, Admiral Darlan, General Huntzinger, General Bergeret, and Admiral Platon. As the French proverb says, ‘the wolves do not each other!” (Ibid.; p. 16.)

26. Cot discusses in detail the appointment of Cagoulard fascists to positions of influence within the Vichy government. “To their astonishment the French people saw Petain slowly fill the most important posts of authority in local, departmental, and central administrations with men who had taken part in the Cagoulard plot, with those who had repeated the infamous refrain ‘rather Hitler than Leon Blum,’ and even with some of those who before or during the war had been arrested for treasonable domestic and foreign activities. The people were applying to the government the old proverb, ‘tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.’ They were alarmed to see Vichy employ for its most delicate missions Ferdinand de Brinon, Jean Montigny, Jean Goy, Jean Luchaire, and Gaston Henry-Haye-members of the Comite France-Allemagne, an organization which, before the war, had been inspired and financed by Otto Abetz, after 1940 Hitler’s Ambassador in Paris. They learned with fury that on the night of the armistice, when France was in mourning, Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of the aristocracy, high finance, and industry had drunk at Bordeaux to the defeat which had rid them of the nightmare of democracy and the Popular Front. The people understood that the Fifth Column in France, as in Spain, had opened the door to Hitler’s agents. And they watched with awe the agents of the Fifth Column become masters of France, the France of Petain, Weygand, and Laval.” (Ibid.; pp. 17-18.)

27. The program highlights Cot’s account of the use of Fifth Column activity by fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. (AFA 10 contains an account of the 1934 coup attempt in the United States by powerful economic interests who hated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.) “The activity of the Fifth Column will not be considered by historians a special phenomenon of French public life, but as an integral part of Fascism. The Fifth Column has appeared wherever Fascism has tried to gain a foothold. It was at work in Spain, Austria, and Czechoslovakia before it turned up in France, and there are Fifth Columns in the United States, India, and Latin America. By the Fifth Column I do not mean only spies and licensed traitors. The Fifth Column includes all who, by accepting fascist doctrines or methods, become the conscious or unconscious accomplices of a foreign power. Treason and complicity have their degrees and nuances. The General Staff of the Fifth column consists principally of ambitious men who try to seize power by destroying or paralyzing the democratic system. The body of the Fifth Column is composed of people who think they are saving their country from the ‘communist menace’ or from ‘British imperialism,’ and who do not even know in whose favor their actions are operating. Through hate of the Poplar Front, good Frenchmen, or men who considered themselves such, served Hitler gratuitously by doing work to which they would never have consented, had they had been offered payment. Why? Because they detested the Republic and democracy more than they loved France. They accepted the idea of the defeat as a necessary evil which permitted them to rid France of the democratic system and to keep in power, in the neighboring countries, the Fascist dictators whom they considered solely capable of maintaining order in Europe. They then became unconscious collaborators of these dictators. They thought they were doing their duty in letting Hitler free France from the ‘Judeo-Masonic’ influence, and Europe from the Communist peril. These people who had never read Marx, considered the ‘Marxist danger’ more immediate than the Hitlerian. They preferred the risks of an entente with a victorious Hitler to the risks of a democratic victory that would cause the collapse of the Fascist dictators in Europe. Considering Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain as knights of an anti-Bolshevist crusade, they became precursors and later partisans of ‘collaboration with Hitler’s New Order.'” (Idem.)

28. “Enough evidence has been published already to prove that France was stabbed in the back by those who saw in Hitler the new St. George who would slay the Communist dragon. When Pierre Lazareff, former editor-in-chief of Paris Soir (the French newspaper with the widest circulation), reports royalists as saying: ‘We need the defeat to wipe out the Republic;’ when Elie Bois, former editor of the Petit Parisien (the most influential political newspaper), reports great industrialists ad admitting to him, during the winter of 1939-1940, that a plot had been organized to replace the democratic regime by a ‘government of authority’ and that this plot presupposed a Nazi victory. . .We have every reason to accept their affirmations, which tally so perfectly with the events.” (Ibid.; pp. 62-63.)

29. “No, France received no exceptional treatment from Hitler and Fascism. A general plan coordinated the activity of the Fifth Columns all over the world. All were recruited from the same circles and had the same social and political composition. The object was the same everywhere: to divide and unnerve public opinion, weaken the resistance of the regime, and prepare a governmental group ready to execute a Fascist coup d’etat at a moment of trouble or confusion. The methods were the same everywhere: cultivation of the seeds of disunity which normally exist among free men and in free countries, exaggeration and inflammation of all racial and religious conflicts, all class rivalries, all political antagonisms, gradual conversion of opposition and dissent into hate, creation of an atmosphere of civil war. The means used were the same everywhere: campaigns of calumny against the democratic leaders capable of opposing Fascism (Blum in France, Roosevelt in the United States), the development of anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism is the first manifestation of racism and contains in petto the whole doctrine of Hitler, use of the fear of Communism among the middle classes, because anti-Communism is the best way to prevent the union of all anti-Fascist forces. This last device has been the most efficacious; the fear of Communism has become, in European and American politics of recent years, a much more important factor than Communism itself.” (Ibid.; p. 64.)

30. After the war, the “business as usual” pattern between the French Fifth Columnists of the Ruhr-Lorraine complex and their German counterparts resumed. Once again, the De Wendels were at the forefront of events. “Along with the unease, the fact that France has lingering and serious social and political ailments is a residue of World War II and of an economic occupation that was never really terminated with the withdrawal of German troops beyond the Rhine. It was this special economic relationship between German and French industrialists that made it possible for Friedrich Flick to arrange with the De Wendel steel firm in France for purchase of his shares in his Ruhr coal combine for $45 million, which was to start him once more on the road back to wealth and power, after years in prison following his conviction at Nuremberg.” (Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Manning; Copyright 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stuart Inc.; ISBN 0-8184-0309-8; pp. 271-272.)

31. As of the time of this writing, it remains to be seen what the outcome of events in the United States will be. It is premature to say that Bush & Co. will be able to use 9/11 to realize a far-right agenda in the U.S. Despite Bush’s cozy relationship to the Saudi perpetrators of 9/11, there has been some public dissent concerning U.S. policy toward the descendants of Ibn Saud. There has also been some dissent concerning Bush’s anti-terrorist proposals and the way in which they will affect traditional American civil liberties. Nevertheless, Bush has (with the aid of a pliant media establishment) been able to use the events of 9/11 to push (with some success) for an extreme agenda, while evading criticism. Constitutional judicial protections and the fundamental balance of power with regard to the waging of war are seriously threatened. Should the U.S. be attacked again, particularly if the attack involve weapons of mass destruction, American democracy will be severely tested. In this context, one should not lose sight of the presence of Islamofascists associated with the Al Taqwa milieu on the GOP ethnic organization-itself a repository for Third Reich alumni in the past. Nor should one lose sight of the Bush family’s Nazi heritage, the Saudi/Bin Laden/Bush links to the milieu of Allen Dulles, and the Bush family links to the Bin Ladens and the Islamofascists of the Youssef Nada milieu.